Generally, advertisements are utilized by advertisers to distribute information to the general public. Traditionally, advertisements are distributed through the mail or broadcasted utilizing radio and/or television. Such advertisements are usually provided in the form of fliers and commercials, respectively. With the emergence of the Internet, advertisers have been able to expand their advertising to Internet subscribers by utilizing banner advertisements, pop-up advertisements, embedded text advertisements, unsolicited electronic mail advertisements, etc.
However, current forms of advertising are commonly required to be distributed to a broadly defined intended audience. For example, mail-based and broadcast-based advertisements are usually targeted to a specified geographic area (e.g. zip code, city, etc.). As another example, Internet-based advertisements are usually targeted to viewers of specified web content. Thus, with advertisements transmitted in such a variety of general ways, it is sometimes difficult for advertisers to target specific customers in an effective manner.
There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.